Harnessing the collective potential of GDPR access rights: towards an ecology of transparency

The GDPR’s goal of empowering citizens can only be fully realised when the collective dimensions of data subject rights are acknowledged and supported through proper enforcement. The power of the collective use of data subjects’ rights, however, is currently neither acknowledged nor properly enforced. This is the message we sent to the European Commission in response to its call for feedback for its two-year review of the GDPR. In our submission entitled Recognising and Enabling the Collective Dimension of the GDPR and the Right of Access – A call to support the governance structure of checks and balances for informational power asymmetries, we demonstrate the collective potential of GDPR access rights with a long list of real-life examples.